"Panto is as important as Shakespeare": Wolverhampton Grand's Ian Adams shows us what it takes to transform into a pantomime dame - with VIDEO and PICTURES
It starts with a wig liner over the hair, then comes the panstick and powder, the Joan Crawford eyebrows, the shimmery eye shadow and scarlet red lippy.
Watching Ian Adams morph into Queen Wilhelmina for his part in The Sleeping Beauty at Wolverhampton's Grand Theatre is a piece of backstage magic.
He has the routine down to 12 minutes. But then he has been playing the pantomime dame for 20 years, not starting until he was 40 but now he could not contemplate Christmas without being part of this very British festive treat.
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This year has been a challenge for him, he says, because he's never played a glamorous dame before but though the costumes have been upgraded, the greasepaint has stayed the same.
"It's basically a clown's face so the make-up is pretty much what it always is," he says. "For me, the audience have got to want to believe you're a mom but they can't forget you're a bloke. Danny La Rue was the master of it. I worked with him quite a bit and learned a lot."
Still sitting in his vest and women's tights, he applies red nail varnish, which is removed every night and applied fresh the next day.
"I couldn't go down the pub in nail varnish," says Ian. "Although Jack Wild used to when we played the Ugly Sisters in Barnstaple. He didn't take it off for the entire season."
Then, still in just his tights and vest, he leaves the privacy of his first-floor dressing room and walks casually through the theatre corridors to the backstage area where he has his own makeshift dressing room in the wing where all the dame's many costume changes take place.
Waiting for him is his dresser Lucy Fowler, from Evesham, who is staying with her grandparents near Sedgley for the duration of the panto run. While Ian pulls on his padded bodysuit, Lucy is ready with frocks, wigs and shoes.
The wigs come with earrings and hats already attached, and the dresses with sewn-on jewellery. The costume changes happen in two minutes flat. They are an impressive double-act.
This the highlight of Ian's acting year. "I love panto and love the Grand," he says. "Coming back here is a joy. Playing that auditorium is just fantastic – even though the grand circle is way up there it feels like the audience are with you."
He saw his first pantomime, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, in a village hall with his nan at the age of six and remembers the dame vividly, though not in a good way.
"My first memory of panto was the dame saying: 'We're now going to be singing When the Red Red Robin Comes Bob-Bob-Bobbing Along. I'm coming out into the audience and anybody not singing is coming up on stage.'
"I was six, I didn't know the words and I was terrified. Now I look back and how did that happen, now you can't get me off the stage."
He was eight when he was taken to his first professional panto – Dick Whittington at the Sheffield Lyceum, starring Ted Rodgers, Vince Hill and Dotty Wayne whom he later toured with, describing to her in exact detail the costume she wore as the Sultana of Morocco.
But it wasn't the life he had planned for himself, certainly not when he was working as an insulating engineer – "I basically lagged pipes" – at British Steel's Orgreave plant just before the miners' strike.
But then, at 22, he was made redundant and because he did amateur dramatics in his spare time, he was sent on a year-long acting course in Rotherham.
Since then he has done everything from Bergerac to singing and dancing his way round the Middle East. This year he is directing for the first time and is also heavily involved in schools' outreach programmes where he talks to youngsters about the traditions of panto, like the custard pie fights, the decorating sketch and the plate smashing.
"The old routines are going – and unless we keep doing them, we're going to lose them. They've been around for 300 years so something must be working.
"Panto is as important as Shakespeare because it's British. Nobody else can do it. The Americans have tried and it didn't work. It's our heritage."
It's time to get into the first of seven costumes and Ian reflects on the task ahead. "It would be nice to be a prince or something and just wear two costumes. The frocks are a faff but they're a necessity. And they're me."
